Recently, Tablo users experienced a prolonged disruption to TV guide data, which prevented some recordings from being scheduled or completed. As the CEO of the company, I want to personally apologize for the disruption, explain what happened, what we’ve done to fix it, and how we’re working to prevent this from happening again.
First: I know how much you rely on Tablo to bring you your favorite content, and I am genuinely sorry for the frustration this disruption may have caused you. I recognize that full restoration wasn’t immediate, and I sincerely thank you for your patience and for the feedback, which ultimately helped us resolve the issue.
Here is a snapshot of the problem, our troubleshooting steps, and the resolution:
On July 27–28, we experienced a separate, unrelated outage caused by an incident in the data center of one of our third-party providers, which impacted Tablo as well as other platforms. While not all units were affected, and most Tablo services were restored within 24 hours, we take events like this seriously. As such, we have begun improving server redundancies and data hosting policies to ensure smoother and faster recovery from potential third-party hosting outages in the future.
Shortly after this was resolved, on July 29, we received reports of missing or blank TV guide data. Our teams worked continuously to troubleshoot the issue, and early signs of progress led us to believe the issue was fixed before it was fully resolved. We apologize for the confusion these early updates may have caused.
The root cause of the issue was traced to timing and processing bottlenecks in how TV guide data was received from our guide provider and synchronized across systems. We’ve since adjusted our processing schedule, optimized data flow between services, and added safeguards to prevent similar issues.
By August 11–12, we had addressed the root causes and rolled out a process for our support team to quickly resolve any remaining scheduling errors for users. While we believe this is now far less common and that most scheduling problems have been fixed, we are prioritizing help for any users still affected. If you continue to experience scheduling errors, please contact our support team.
We treat issues like this with urgency and are applying what we’ve learned through troubleshooting this incident to strengthen testing, improve monitoring, and make our systems more resilient.
Looking ahead, we are continuing to invest in updates that make Tablo’s features more robust in the face of unforeseen issues. One of these is “Offline Mode,” which will allow you to keep watching live TV and completed recordings, even if our servers are temporarily unavailable. This feature is currently in Beta testing, with continuous refinements being made to improve its performance and usability. We remain committed to releasing this feature across most of Tablo’s compatible device platforms in the coming weeks.
To everyone who reached out with feedback, concerns, and questions while we worked through this: thank you. We value your business and your trust and will continue doing everything we can to earn it every day.
Outages happen, the problem is leaving us in the dark to figure out the problem. We should have received notification of the problem when it was first discovered not after it was resolved! I spent waaaay too much time on useless attempts at a fix when nothing I could do would have helped!!!
Better communication between the people that know what’s going on and us, the people that don’t know what’s going on. I like others spent lots of time uninstalling, reinstalling, scanning, rescanning uploading guide information over and over and over communication could have made this effort unnecessary.
Please consider using a simple dashboard service for system status. Like Zabbix for example. This would have certainly helped to automate the status to your customers. As a former IT exec, I do appreciate how difficult it is to find capacity and bandwidth issues. Very, very tough. I appreciate your transparency, and communication. It’s a responsible and respected action. The offline mode is sorely needed and is a welcomed update! Thank you.
Thank you for the explanation. I’m in the tech field and understand that during an outage like this it is not that easy to give an explanation about the cause of the issue.
It would be beneficial in the future not to be told to constantly reboot, reload, clear cache, etc. when it was pretty well known that these efforts would not solve the problem. I’m sure many people lost recordings when rebooting their device by accidentally doing a factory restore.
I did not go through all those needless hoops because I knew better but many people didn’t though I and others in this community mentioned that fact. Maybe in the future tell people not to do anything on their side until it is definitively the right thing to do to fix the issue.
Regarding Offline Mode: Please also consider ability to record locally scheduled over-the-air live TV programs. I also concur with need to acknowledge and communicate system problems to end users in timely fashion rather than 3 weeks after the fact.
My understanding from before gen 4 tablo is that the guide info coms from a different company which Tablo does not control and has to rely on that company to update their info.
How about an update on when you will support the user-selectable start screen option on Gen 4? Those of us who are caregivers for spouses with Alzheimer’s have found the Gen 4 to be unusable for those we support. I am evaluating a Zapper Box, which does support startup on the Guide page.
I think Tablo has lost its customer focus and its vision of what I consider its core business: providing a tool for viewing and recording OTA TV. I can get the cheap streaming stuff anywhere.
Tablo really, really needs to actually deliver an offline mode. You’ve been talking about it forever, like since you purchased the company and took over.
Get with it. You can’t make money off our viewing data, if we all abandon the platform as unreliable.
Yes, the ability to record a time slot without any guide would be helpful. During the outage there was a time slot without any guide. I could not record just because the guide was missing. Able to watch live, but not record. Making the recording less dependent on the guide would be very good.
